


Let the Golden Age Begin

by gwyneth rhys (gwyneth)



Series: Celluloid Hero [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Golden Age Hollywood, Grief/Mourning, Movie Night, Reminiscing, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-02 00:34:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16776061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwyneth/pseuds/gwyneth%20rhys
Summary: The story had brought Steve up with a short, sharp shock: he’d been blinded by his own self-pity and loneliness and never considered the way his death had affected his acquaintances in Hollywood.





	Let the Golden Age Begin

**Author's Note:**

> The (probably) last of the follow-up stories to Celluloid Hero.

The VA office Sam Wilson worked out of was in a rundown building in a neighborhood not that far from Steve’s place. Everything around it had been gentrified in the obscenely expensive way of modern city life, the surrounding blocks filling with characterless, enormous apartment buildings, posh hotels, and upscale shops that sold things no one needed, and the streets buzzed with ceaseless construction. Sooner or later, someone would get hold of Sam’s building and raze it, put something shiny and new and devoid of character in its place. All the history that lived in its bones would be erased, lost to time.

Sort of like Steve. 

But hey, Sam had said, tossing his keys in the air after locking his office door as they headed out, at least it was close to a Shake Shack. 

Steve stirred the straw around in his peanut butter-chocolate milkshake, listening to Sam talk about his two veterans groups that day—the morning group and the one Steve had dropped in to catch the last half of. Underneath the stories, though, Steve was pretty sure Sam was angling for a hook that might lure Steve to join one. He didn’t know Sam well enough yet to do anything other than acknowledge the effort with a polite smile.

Things were so different now, people _expected_ you to get therapy and talk about your messed-up feelings, it was practically a requirement. He didn’t know how to explain that for someone like him, that wouldn’t happen. Laying himself bare to strangers—even if they could have been from his own war rather than the young vets he’d seen that day—wasn’t how he did things. 

It was one more piece of proof of how little he fit here. How much had been erased from his bones. Peggy teased him about moping over exactly this kind of thing, but she hadn’t exactly time-traveled here from a bygone era. She’d had time to learn the customs of the age.

“...and that’s when I decided I could dump the bodies out in that corner of Rock Creek Park and the cops would probably never find them.”

 _Wait._ “What?” Steve asked, blinking.

Sam favored him with a condescending but amused stare and sat back, draining his iced tea. He shoved all their trash together on his tray, stacking it on Steve’s. “How long was I telling you about my history as a serial killer before you finally tuned in?”

Steve’s shoulders sagged, he gave an embarrassed, thin laugh. “I’m sorry. It’s not that I meant to be disrespectful. I really was listening to you, but somewhere in the middle there I started...what’s it called? Spacing out?” It happened with greater frequency than he wished, and he added, “I’m not normally so rude.”

Cocking his head, Sam studied Steve’s face. “You been having some bad days lately, I guess.”

His eyebrow shot up. “That obvious, huh?”

“Only to someone who looks at you.” He had a great sideways grin, and his eyes twinkled when he teased. There was something about him that you immediately felt at ease around, trusted. 

“Well, then, I guess my secret’s safe.” Steve stared at the table, drew a circle in the little condensation puddle. “I meant it when I said that it wasn’t so bad, that there are good things now. But sometimes it’s just... I find myself back there. A better age, one where I belonged.”

“Was there anyone left alive when you came out of the ice?”

“Agent Carter. For a very brief time, Gabe Jones—he was the youngest of us, but he passed on in late 2012.” It was still so mind-numbing to even say those dates like they weren’t science fiction; the very concept of the twenty-first century had been only a far-fetched, distant fantasy to him. That he might live long enough to see it had seemed impossible. So few of his contemporaries had...

After SHIELD had shown him how to use a computer, he’d spent hours going through all the biographies of people he’d known to see what had happened to them, whether from the Army or Brooklyn or Hollywood. The results were almost never happy: for every person who’d lived to a ripe old age and passed away peacefully, there were three who’d died tragic or painful deaths—some even violent, like Howard and his wife. _Wife!_ That had taken Steve a while to wrap his head around. 

Many times, Steve had slammed the screen shut on his laptop, breaking it, to the point where eventually Agent Lopez, the SHIELD techie in charge of bringing Captain America into the 21st century, had stuck one in an unwieldy and ugly shatterproof, waterproof box and handed it to him wordlessly. 

When he’d started down the rabbit hole of Old Hollywood fan sites—not so old to him—that had been the end of that laptop and its protective case, too. He’d found out about what had happened to John Garfield and his poor, darling daughter, Kathy, not so long after Steve had lived with them, and lost his last shred of control. He didn’t enjoy making Agent Lopez miserable, but she had come over one day with a small black box, sighed, and set it on the table. “Courtesy of Mr. Stark, sir,” she’d said, showing him how to work the screen that hovered in the air, waving hands like a maniac. He’d had to resort to punching bags instead.

“That is really rough, I’m so sorry,” Sam said, sliding his chair back and getting up with the trays. Steve wiped his table off and gestured to the woman and little girl who’d been sharking their seat once it looked like they might leave. She smiled gratefully and the little girl shrieked with joy when she realized who she was looking at; he stopped to allow a selfie with her as Sam stood by the back door, grinning. “Everywhere you go, huh?” 

“Pretty much.”

“So all the folks you lost would have included...the Howling Commandos, and you were in the USO, if I recall my seventh grade history.”

“All of them were gone, yeah.” Steve slid his sunglasses on. He thought he’d parked a little more over toward the VA, but he was always having trouble orienting himself here; there was something about Washington’s many diagonal streets and circles that made it easy for him to get turned around when he thought he knew exactly where he was heading. Occasionally, he wondered if the long nap hadn’t done something to his previously fantastic sense of direction. “And the movie stars. Even the ones who’d been younger than me were gone.” They had all been pulled under the ocean of time with him, but only he had come out alive.

They waited at a crosswalk, Sam’s head tilted up, as if he was trying to recall something. “Wait, so you—you were on the stage, right? You knew movie stars, too?” He wasn’t just reiterating what Steve had said, he genuinely didn’t seem to know the answer to that, and Steve gave him a quizzical glance. 

“Are you saying you don’t recall my Oscar-robbed film oeuvre? I was a legend.” Steve put his hand on his heart in shocked dismay. They crossed the street, and Steve was disappointed to realize Sam would have to either go back to work or head home. For the first time since he’d been awake, Steve really didn’t want an afternoon to end. It was just...nice to talk to someone without all the Captain America weight hanging in between them, or constantly wondering what was on someone’s agenda, what they would try to get him to do. Sam was utterly genuine, everything about him was right there in front of you. 

“I mean, I guess I knew that,” Sam allowed, “but I hadn’t really considered it part of the Cap legend. Didn’t seem like the important thing to recall about you.” He flashed a grin and Steve shook his head. He couldn’t help thinking that Bucky would have approved of Sam in every way, especially of Sam giving him shit. “Now that I think about it, though, I’m realizing I’ve never seen them. Newsreels, sure, you’d see stuff like that in history class and little me was pretty psyched that you had a brother in your squad, but I don’t know. Forgot about the full-length movies.” Sam beamed when Steve scoffed at “history class,” then pointed to the VA offices. “Where you parked?”

“Few blocks that way.” He raised his hand, getting ready to say goodbye, but Sam jumped in with something else before he could speak.

“How many movies you make? They were like, _movies_ movies, right?”

“Yeah, feature-length pictures. Well. The first one was a short, a sort of propaganda piece, basically a film version of the stage show for bond sales. The ones I made after, at Warner Brothers, started out as serials but then they made them into two features. It was pretty wild, I’d had no idea filmmaking was so complicated.”

“Man, I think I want to see these. I _need_ to see these. Watch you strut your stuff in tights.”

Steve gave him a killing look. After a beat, when Sam had finally stopped cackling, he said, “Well, they’re available on YouTube. Used to be free, I guess, lots of people had uploaded them, but after I came back, those vanished and now you have to pay a couple bucks.”

“Worth it,” Sam said with a grin, almost bouncing on his toes. “So, what are you doing the rest of the day? We could pull it up on the streaming, you can tell me all the wacky behind the scenes shenanigans and scandalous secrets. I’m about twenty minutes from here, if we hit it before rush hour.”

Shaking his head, Steve tried to demur, but Sam only encouraged him more. “I got nothin’ the rest of the day, you don’t exactly seem like you’re booked up right now. I’m telling you, the least you can do is give me some skin back after trolling me the other day.”

That morning on the Mall had been the first time Steve could recall feeling an honest-to-god smile cross his lips, the first time since Bucky had died that he’d known a sense of...ease with someone. It was only a fleeting sensation, a tiny nugget of comfort, but the fact that he’d felt it at all had been something of a revelation. “Okay. Why not. But you gotta realize,” Steve said, leading the way towards his bike, “old movies means old acting styles, and a lot of people these days find it ridiculous and too corny for words. There wasn’t exactly the Method stuff back then.” Julie’s acting style had been like the post-war methods, but as Thelma’d said, he approached it like a science. The rest of them just looked kind of histrionic next to him, and Sam would probably be embarrassed for Steve.

Spreading his hands wide, Sam said, “Oh, trust me, I know. For a while, I thought I was all up on that—I’d seen _Casablanca, Maltese Falcon_ , the classics, at movie night on the PJ base. But then when I got back, I started regularly watching that old movie channel, and it was kinda cool. One night, I’m all settled in, got my popcorn and my beer, watching cute, perky little Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland put on a show, and then all of a sudden with no warning, blam! pickaninnies and watermelon and blackface. Put an end to that classic-movie-watching binge pretty fast, I’ll tell you what.”

They’d reached his bike, and Steve stuck the key in and turned it on, revving it a little. “Yeah,” he said over the roar of the engine, “it could be pretty bad, I have to admit. I’m sorry you had to see that. I will say one thing—I had a great director who shared my outlook on problems like that, and it’s one reason we did have a slightly integrated team in the pictures. Not saying we couldn’t have done better, of course we could have, there’s no dispute. And there’s still the lousy racism of who we were fighting in the war—I look back at some of that dialog about the Japanese and I cringe. So if you want to change your mind, I understand, believe me.” 

“Nah, I’m willing to give it a try. I bet I’ll get comments for weeks out of them.” When Steve motioned at the back of the seat, Sam eyeballed it with apprehension. “You know there’s a helmet law in this town.”

Climbing on the bike, Steve said, “Yeah, I know.” He grinned, and Sam shook his head, but eventually that sunny smile came back and he got on behind Steve. As they rode, Sam directed Steve toward his house across the river in Arlington, and Steve found himself wondering how well he was going to handle seeing the pictures again. He’d watched the second film, _Captain America: Call to Victory_ , in camp one night, Peggy on one side of him and Bucky on the other, all the boys in the squad behind him. Oh, they’d teased him, sure, especially his big “reunion” kissing scene with Ida, but it was nothing like the crap Sam would probably give him. Still, Steve owed him some teasing after lapping him on the Mall, he was right about that. He’d been dealing with Bucky’s loss and Peggy’s decline this long, one more night watching the movies wouldn’t matter.

“Help yourself to a beer, make yourself at home,” Sam said, pointing to the refrigerator. “I’ll be right back.” He headed down the hall and Steve stood there for a minute, feeling awkward. Should he take his jacket off and sit on the couch, or continue to stand here and wait for Sam to come back? He’d never really gone over to someone’s place and just...hung out. Back then, his only real pal had been Bucky, and since he’d come back, he hadn’t socialized at all. He’d been to Avengers Tower a few times, but for very specific dealings with the group, and then once Fury’d convinced him to run teams in DC, he’d primarily kept to himself. Clint and Natasha had both visited him when they were in town, but they hadn’t really hung out, either—mostly they went someplace for lunch or dinner. He settled for opening two beers and leaning casually against the counter, trying not to look too stupid.

Sam grabbed some snacks, but Steve was still stuffed from lunch, so he concentrated on his beer as Sam turned on the TV and pulled up the streaming channel. He hadn’t really gotten over the transitions TV had gone through over the decades—it was absolutely fascinating to a guy who’d seen the earliest televised broadcasts on a tiny, flickering screen at the World’s Fair. Out of everything that had changed, though, it was the fact that you could call up whole libraries of programming at will and beam it straight to your screen in whatever way you wanted that still knocked him over. “Do you want to start with the short film?” Steve asked.

“Will that make you look more, or less, foolish than the movies?” Sam was so hopeful for the first.

“More. I think.” Yet he found the corner of his mouth tugging up despite the worry. “I’m surrounded by dancing girls, wearing—what do you call it, bootie shorts, so I don’t think there’s any way to make that appear smooth.” After he’d gone through the SHIELD files and found out what had happened to everyone from his unit, he’d dug into the histories of the gals from the show. A lot of them had gone on to marry and raise families, giving up the footlights and tap shoes for a settled life. But a couple had kept dancing into later years, and a few had made a steady living dancing in film and theatre well into late middle age. None of them had made it big, but he’d been pleased in a melancholy way that they’d mostly done all right for themselves. 

“I spent most of the premiere of this in the men’s toilet,” Steve confided, and Sam looked like he might just perish from glee at that. “I had an arranged date—the studio made you go out with people for the press—with a really accomplished, beautiful actress named Gail Patrick, and I was so nervous about seeing myself on the screen that I brought up my dinner a few minutes in. You know, so I could have a heaping portion of extra humiliation, because my atrocious acting and the costume weren’t enough.”

Sam was trying hard not to laugh, putting on his understanding face. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of her.”

“ _My Man Godfrey_? That was her most famous movie.”

“I’ve heard of that. Haven’t seen it, though. So did you date her for real, or not?”

“No, I really didn’t. To be honest, I didn’t date much back then. We traveled all the time for the show, and then when I got to Hollywood, I was working a lot, showing up at the Hollywood Canteen most nights.” At Sam’s confusion, he explained what the Canteen was, and Sam seemed dutifully impressed. “I went out with a few people, but...” How could he explain his relationship with Hedy Lamarr, not to mention the longing he’d felt for Bucky and Peggy, so far away from him when he’d been in Hollywood? They called it the Golden Age of film, now, and it had come down through history as the ultimate in glamour, in living the high life. There wasn’t room in the story for struggling with loneliness and homesickness and trying to fill the ache with whatever you could, even if it meant standing on a stage every night just to keep yourself from going nuts. 

Despite the time they’d spent together today, he still didn’t know Sam well enough to feel comfortable talking about his romantic life. He couldn’t stand the thought of being high-fived or congratulated for sleeping with someone like Hedy. Sam didn’t seem the type, but it had been pointed out many times to Steve that he often expected the best from people, even if they weren’t deserving of his faith.

The most painful research into his Hollywood friends had been for Hedy, Bette, and Julie. At least Hedy’s life story had been somewhat redeemed by the recognition of her invention’s importance. Howard had done right by her, in the end, when Steve had reunited with him in Europe and told him her story: Howard helped Hedy set up a space for inventing and gave her all the tools she could use, giving her advice and friendship. Years later, her device’s patent had been rescued from the Navy, and Steve wondered if Howard might have had his hands in that, too. He thought about that every time he used his phone, glad that the world had finally seen more in Hedy than just her looks. 

Sam abruptly leaned forward to squint at the screen. “Are you wearing _pirate boots_?”

That was a very effective antidote to Steve’s woolgathering and melancholy memories. He twitched his head sideways, grimacing with embarrassment. “Yeah, I would be.” 

“Did we just—I don’t know, collectively blot this from our consciousness? This level of dorkitude?” Sam was clutching his thighs, trying not to burst into guffaws. “I remembered this really differently.”

Steve spread his hands. “My only defense is that the fellow who designed the costume did it for the stage, and seeing it from a distance. Also, I’m fairly certain he’d never seen a soldier in his life, being the, you know, theatrical type. We sort of...inherited that for the movies, but the first thing I did was change those boots when I started sketching out ideas for a real field uniform.”

“That is a shitty defense and doesn’t make it any less hilarious.” Steve side-eyed Sam; there was a strange warmth creeping into his chest. It just felt so goddamn right, being teased again, as if Bucky’s ghost was here, feeding Sam lines. Having someone be comfortable enough with him, friendly enough, to give Steve a hard time. From the moment they’d met, there hadn’t been a whiff of deference from Sam, and even though he’d known Steve was Captain America, he couldn’t have cared less—it was the human underneath the uniform he cared about, pirate boots and all.

They watched the rest of the short in silence, and when it was over, Sam queued up _Captain America: Call to Arms_ , checking that it was okay with a hesitant glance. Steve got another beer for both of them. 

“What about her?” Sam asked, waggling his brows, when Ida appeared on the screen. “Don’t you actors have lots of on-set affairs?”

“Maybe _actors_ did, but I didn’t. Ida was happily married, and honestly, I don’t know that I’d have risked the friendships, because I couldn’t have survived without Ida, or Bette or any of the other women I knew. They were great friends to have.” He’d found an article about Bette, who’d lived to a very old but lonely age, that discussed how inconsolable she’d been when he’d gone down in the Valkyrie. She’d kept in touch with Howard for decades, apparently, hoping that one of his regular attempts to find Steve in the Arctic Circle would pay off and she’d see Steve once more. 

The story had brought Steve up with a short, sharp shock: he’d been blinded by his own self-pity and loneliness and never considered the way his death had affected his acquaintances in Hollywood. For so much of his time there, it had been a place he’d wanted quit of—yet those people had never wanted him to leave them, and they had genuinely grieved his loss. Not only Julie and Bette, either: Steve had gotten the help of a reference librarian to find other articles that mentioned their reactions to the news of his death. Hedy had apparently been on set when someone announced the crash; she’d simply walked off the set and drove home, called in sick for two days straight, until they’d threatened to suspend her. Barbara and Cary had organized a memorial for him, attended by hundreds, and they’d funded a small statue in the Hollywood Forever cemetery that had been dedicated by Dum Dum and Jim, as well as a star on the Walk of Fame. Miss Parsons had devoted countless columns to him. One of the big LA theatres had renamed their largest auditorium in his honor at Jack Warner’s request, though it had been razed in the late seventies for a shopping mall. Fitting, he supposed.

Later, he’d stumbled on a talk-show interview in which Ida was asked about working with Captain America, where she’d said that finding out about him had been one of the most devastating moments of her career. “We all adored him, you know. He left his mark on everyone. Randolph Scott went out to his farm and didn’t come back for days, Patricia Cosgrove was overseas and apparently she and Marlene Dietrich went on a four-day bender. I might have had a lot to drink myself.” Warner had always told Steve he made more impact on people than he realized; Steve had simply never swallowed it.

After a few crucial action scenes, Sam declared, “You must have let yourself have _some_ fun while you were there.”

“It’s constantly funny, I think, what seems to have survived about me—well, about Captain America, because not a lot seems to have stuck around about Steve Rogers. Not over the decades, anyway.” He watched himself rescue the “Howling Commandos” on screen, and thought about the real rescue, how very bad off Bucky’d been. How much he’d suffered. He found it excruciating that Howard hadn’t dedicated himself equally to searching for Bucky, that no one had thrown huge memorial services for him, or named buildings in his honor. Bucky’d deserved so much more. 

After a moment, Steve realized Sam was talking, but all Steve caught was “you’re a troll.”

“I think Mr. Warner—the studio head—thought he was scoring quite a coup by getting me to make movies there. Everyone had their own image of Cap, and Warner just had no idea what he was getting into with the real me. I think he found that version...a handful. Most people did.” And yet they’d cared for him enough to be heartbroken at his loss.

Sam nodded. “Right, because you’re a troll. No one knew what an asshole you really were behind that mask.” 

Except Bucky and Peggy and the boys. “Not even a little bit.” Steve grinned at him. “They could put Ida or John Garfield on suspension, and they did stuff like that a lot—because actors were locked into these terrible contracts—but they couldn’t really touch me because technically the Army still owned me. I guess they’ve erased that memory of me, though. Didn’t fit the narrative.” He hoped Sam never found out about the student PSAs they'd made him do.

“There was that guy they had step into your pirate boots and short-shorts in the fifties. Punch the commies, you know, kick the beatniks’ asses. I definitely remember him.”

Steve shuddered. That had pissed him off when he’d found out: he wouldn’t have cared if someone had stepped into the role—well, he might have, but he liked to think he’d have been glad to leave it behind—but that they’d used Cap in support of a witch hunt, helping to destroy the lives of people like Robbie Garfield, infuriated him. Many of the actors he’d been closest to in Los Angeles had flirted with communism or socialism at some point. And then an entire generation had grown up thinking Captain America was a right-wing stooge and gung-ho warmonger, and that made Steve downright sick.

They watched movie Cap punching a few bad guys out—the fights were so painfully dated—and Sam said, “I like this guy who doesn’t fit the narrative, myself. He’s a hell of a lot more fun than the guy in my textbooks.” Holding his bottle toward Steve, he smiled, that sweet open look that Steve had seen on the Mall. Steve raised his bottle and clinked it against Sam’s.

Watching with Sam felt a little like when he’d watched with Bucky for the first time: how he took everything in, the way he reacted to each moment with such fresh eyes. Steve wondered if that was how movie stars always felt, seeing their projects for the first time—there wasn’t much magic left after you’d filmed it and seen the dailies, but through their eyes, the magic returned.

When the credits rolled—god, movie credits were _so long_ now, they acknowledged everyone who’d ever breathed on a set, including the damn caterers and drivers—Sam turned to him, grinning. 

“Okay, I have a couple reactions.”

Steve raised an eyebrow. 

“One, that was not nearly as cheesy as you made it sound, and you were actually pretty decent. I mean, it’s a product of its time, sure, but it ain’t half bad. No one would know that was your first time acting unless you told them. So stop playing that ‘oh I gotta warn you this is awful, it’s embarrassing’ card. Two, are you really saying you did not get with your co-star, because she is straight-up scorching.”

Steve made a noise of fake outrage. “No, really, I didn’t. Ida was—she was a mentor in a way, I guess, a friend. Just a great gal, she went on to become one of the only women directors after the war. But I will cop to the fact that learning to screen kiss with her wasn’t...you know, bad.”

Sam laughed, genuine and fond.

For a moment, Steve wavered, and then he decided what the hell. He obviously was friends with Sam now. He pulled his phone from his pocket and called up the search page. “So, this is Gail Patrick,” and he turned the screen to Sam.

“Wow. Yeah, that’d not be a bad date, even if they ordered you to. What a way to follow orders.”

He flipped through and found a different page. “And this is the woman I did date for a while, Hedy Lamarr.” Sam’s mouth dropped open. 

“Okay, even I’ve heard of her.”

“The first date I ever had on my own was with Barbara Stanwyck,” he said as he pulled up more pictures. “I got dating advice from Cary Grant and Randolph Scott because my friend Bucky had always been the one to set things up, find the girls, and they never wanted to go out with me on my own—I think they were mostly in love with Buck and hoped he’d notice them more if they threw his pathetic buddy a few crumbs.”

“Have you not looked in a mirror for, like, the past eighty years?” Sam asked, gaping.

Steve felt his face turning crimson. “I just didn’t have much experience, but fortunately both of them were kind to me, and I learned a lot about relationships, I guess.”

“Cary freaking Grant gave you dating advice. What do you even say to that?” Sam looked at the rest of the pictures of Hedy on Steve’s phone. “That’s...man, that is a pretty stunning woman to have your first relationship with. Way to go, past you.”

“A lot of people called her the most beautiful woman in the world.” 

“That does not surprise me. I know they did a lot of touching-up stuff, but that’s obviously good material to start with.”

Steve was overcome with a sharp, aching nostalgia and he reminded himself to breathe, keep a lid on it. For him, it’d been only a few years ago that he’d been in her bed. “She was so much more than her looks—she was always interested in science, but of course, wasn’t exactly encouraged to go into it. Her career didn’t really go the way it should have, it seems, but during the war, she and a friend invented a system that became cell technology, if I understand correctly—Bluetooth. So her reputation in recent years has been more about her inventions than her looks.” As it should be.

“Yeah, right! That’s why I remember her name.” Sam handed his phone back. “You did not do half bad for yourself if you really had no game, like you say.”

“Oh, I definitely had no game. I wasn’t even in the neighborhood of knowing where the game was.” 

He found himself staring at his hands for a moment, before he looked at Sam, remembering something warmer. “I don’t think Bucky truly believed that any of these things had happened to me until I took him to meet Marlene Dietrich, and she was quite taken with him. At the party after her USO show, the two of them disappeared for a while, and I always figured they’d had a tryst, but he would never confirm it because a gentleman doesn’t tell. But he was always so much smoother around the ladies than I was, even when he was awestruck by them.”

Sam seemed really touched by that, nodding when he could see what that memory meant, and gave Steve a moment to collect himself. He got up from the couch. “You wanna watch the second movie? Got anywhere else to be?”

Steve had only seen it the once, and he wasn’t sure how much more he could take tonight, reminded so acutely of when he’d seen it a few short years ago with those he’d loved most in the world. Now it’d be like hitting yourself on a bruise, over and over, watching these people who’d tumbled down past history, the people who’d grieved his loss and would never know he’d returned so impossibly. Just as they’d have remembered him. “Oh, I don’t know. You must have work tomorrow and it’ll be late by the time it’s over.”

Dipping his head to the side, Sam considered him for a beat, glanced at the clock. Steve felt incredibly transparent. “First group ain’t till ten in the morning. You hungry again, yet? I got plenty of beer in the fridge and pizza on my contacts list.” At Steve’s hesitation, he waved a hand. “I wanna see how you mess up the bad guys in this one. And more importantly, are you really gonna deny me more pirate boot mockery? You still owe me, brother.”

Steve ducked his head, scratched at this temple. For the first time since he’d woken up, he could recall what friendship was like. Sam was grinning at him, his eyes sparking in the living-room light, like Steve had somehow stumbled his way ashore in the land of the living and Sam had just been waiting here with welcome, and solace, and light. A new golden age, maybe.

The anchor that had dragged him down, kept him moored in the past, broke free in the wake of Sam’s smile, and Steve felt like he could move forward into the horizon that had seemed so far away. 

He might still get misty-eyed watching his old friends on the screen, but Steve didn’t think Sam would mind. He returned Sam’s smile, pulled two more bottles of beer out of the refrigerator, and said, “Yeah, I can stay and hang out. Pizza and a movie sounds really good.”

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to those of you who've followed along with this series. 
> 
> [On tumblr.](http://teatotally.tumblr.com/post/180602197885/new-fic-final-celluloid-hero-story)


End file.
